When I came to, I reached above my head and stretched, the sunlight warming my face as I yawned. I dug my head into the soft pillow, wanting just ten more minutes before meeting Father and Mother for breakfast.
“Little witch.” Lord Stryker’s gravelly voice reached me and my eyelids snapped open.
I was in a bed. An amazingly soft bed with luscious white satin sheets. I moved to sit up when something tugged at my ankles. I lifted the bedding and glanced down at my leg only to find metal biting into the soft flesh. I was chained to a four-poster bed. And not only that. Someone had changed me into a thin white robe.
Shock ripped through me, but I tried not to let it show. “I didn’t take you for a man who likes to tie his women up before bedding them.”
I could barely believe the crass words had left my mouth, but if I was going to play the seduction role, I needed to play it hard.
Lord Stryker looked horrified at the thought of bedding me. “You smell like a pig pen. Bedding you is the last thing on my mind. I’m not completely unhappy to see you are alive though. You proved useful, and I have more people for you to question.”
Alive? That was a little dramatic, wasn’t it? Of course I was alive.
A woman in a white apron with small horns protruding from her forehead came over to press her fingers to my wrist. “Her heart is finally steady, my lord. I think she’s going to make it.”
Make it? I sat up quickly, scooching down so that my leg didn’t pull on the shackle. I tried not to stare at the unseelie fae. I’d read about them, of course, seen sketches of what they might look like, but never had I gazed upon one in real life. It was less jarring than I thought it would be.
“How long was I out?” I asked, peering down at myself again. It looked like someone had attempted to give me a sponge bath and there was a tube hanging out of my arm and going to a clear bag that hung on a post. I’d seen them in the medical ward back in Faerie for severely dehydrated patients, but I’d never had need of one.
“Three days,” the women who I assumed was some type of nurse said.
Three days!
Fear flushed through me. That was the longest ever.
The nurse called out to someone who stood at the door. “She needs food. Start with mush and work up to solids.”
Mush.My stomach groaned in discomfort. It felt hollowed out and like it would swallow me up at any moment.
“No. Mush isn’t necessary. I’ll take a steak, roasted potatoes, chocolate cake, honey chicken, and vegetable soup please.” I smiled sweetly. “Oh, and some soft bread with butter would be wonderful.”
The nurse raised her eyebrows and she looked at Lord Stryker who appeared to be trying to conceal a smile.“She gets the mush. We will see if she can earn the steak,” he ordered.
I genuinely wanted to weep then. I hadn’t realized how much I loved real food until this very moment.
“And please, for the love of my sanity, bathe her and let me know when she can use her magic again,” he told the nurse.
“Yes, my lord.” She bowed and he left the room.
The woman peered down at me and clicked her tongue. “I’ve been doing this awhile. Never heard a heartbeat that faint on someone who survived.”
Her words frightened me to my core. I knew my heart was weak, of course I knew, but my mother babied me so much my entire life I had never really experienced anything like this. Three days? I had never thought it might kill me … until now.
After taking the tube and needle out of my arm, she unlatched the cuff around the bedpost only to quickly reattach it to her own leg. So instead of being bound to a bedpost I was bound to a nurse.
I eyed her. She wasn’t tall, but she had some girth. I was weak, but after I regained some of my strength, I thought I could take her.
She must have read the calculating gleam in my eye because she sneered at me, “I feel it wise to tell you that my magic is powerful. If you try to subdue me I will boil your blood from the inside out.”
My eyes widened and I nodded. Scratch that, I would not be trying anything with her.
After a blissfully hot bath where I scrubbed my hair and skin so raw with scented soap that I was quite pink,she gave me a housemaid’s dress to wear. It was navy blue cotton, simple and clean, so I wasn’t complaining.
When the mushy oatmeal came I scarfed it in under a minute.
“What’s your name?” I asked her, practically licking the bowl clean. I was back to being tied to the bed.
“Shantel,” she said as she felt for my pulse like the doctors did back home.
